I have heard a saying - the one thing which sets apart a Linux administrator Guru from a Novice is how much more the former is able to accomplish with so few keystrokes. I do not know the veracity of that saying. But IBM Developerworks has - as usual, put together a collection of tricks which will help raise the efficiency of any system administrator by a notch or two. I am no Guru, nor am I a novice. I guess I fall somewhere in the grey areas between the two extremes, which makes reading the tricks really informative for me.

Among the tricks described are Linux commands which we seldom use such as - fuser, reset, screen, as well as invaluable tips like - resetting the root password, SSH back door entry, using VNC to SSH tunnel to a remote machine, checking your bandwidth, a couple of command line tricks, spying on the console and finally Random system information collection.